The Performing Arts Center will present the Attacca Quartet Oct. 5 at 3 p.m. in Hodgson Concert Hall. Open free to the public, this performance is the 2014 Payne Memorial Concert.
Part of the Franklin College Chamber Music Series, the concert honors the late William Jackson Payne, the former dean of the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences. Payne also was the founder of the Chamber Music Series.
The Attacca Quartet was formed in 2003 by students at the Juilliard School. The group now has become one of America’s premier young chamber ensembles.
The quartet was the top prizewinner at the 2011 Osaka International Chamber Music Competition, the 2011 Melbourne International Chamber Music Competition and the 60th annual Coleman Chamber Ensemble Competition in 2006. The group was recently named Quartet-in-Residence for New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, a position the Guarneri String Quartet held for 43 years.
The Attacca Quartet made its professional debut in 2007 as part of the Artists International Winners Series in Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall. The group’s recording of the complete string quartet works of John Adams was released in 2013 to critical acclaim. The New York Times called the CD “exuberant, funky and exactingly nuanced.”
The Attacca Quartet’s Athens program will include works by Haydn, Mendelssohn, Beethoven and Adams. While on campus, the quartet also will perform Oct. 7 for the Performing Arts Center’s new Noontime Concert Series.